The Gooseberry Fool (3 page)

“I understand that Hugo managed to get it rather more cheaply than many houses round here. Mr. Potter and he were connected in some way. No good, I can’t remember.”

“Then I’ll only ask you two more questions and you can go. Okay?”

Father Lawrence nodded. When all was said and done, he was an old man with gray hair, and exhaustion had now made his face gray, too. Had he been a grandfather, his children would have long since insisted on escorting him to his bed.

“Firstly, can you think of any reason why anyone should do this to Mr. Swart?”

“None at all. In the relatively short time I have known him, I have grown—grew to regard him as one of the finest lay Christians I have ever been graced to meet. Hugo was quiet, unassuming, yet always ready to lend a helping hand. He was also blessed with a quite outstanding ability to make the most of the power of prayer. Our Holy Hours took on.…”

Father Lawrence was only just keeping himself from collapse. Strydom went over to his bag and rummaged for an appropriate pill. Kramer felt he had lived through the same scene once before.

“My other question, Reverend, then that’s all,” Kramer said. “Do you know if Mr. Swart ever partook of liquor?”

“It isn’t against the laws of the Church, Lieutenant.” Father Lawrence smiled faintly. “In fact, there’s nothing I want more at this moment than a brandy in warm milk.”

Then he concentrated again and shook his head.

“Hugo never touched a drop of alcohol,” he added. “Nothing prudish, you understand; after all, our Lord drank wine. He never gave a reason but, well, I think it would have simply been out of keeping with his character, that’s all. We still admired him for it, of course.”

Kramer rose to shake hands and then Strydom accompanied the priest out to the street. On Strydom’s return to the kitchen, he saw Kramer dip a finger in an orange-colored fluid splashed over the counter.

“Vodka,” remarked Kramer, licking it.

“Then the plot thickens. Swart was mixing the drink for someone else—for a caller?”

“And the caller killed him for the bottle—because, if not, where has it got to? Not in any of the cupboards.” Strydom looked around and nodded.

“True, then the—”

“Then nothing.” Kramer laughed, pulling out the vegetable tray and revealing the dead man’s secret.

“I’ll tell you something about our Mr. Swart here, doc: like most Catholics, he went to another church to say his confessions. That’s a bet.”

Strydom declined to put money on it; he had been caught more than once by the lieutenant.

“Not really any need for anyone to know,” he ventured instead.

“Agreed. Let’s you and me finish it off when we get back to your place. Got plenty of ice?”

“Destroy the evidence? Come, Lieutenant!”

“All in a good cause.”

It was rare for Kramer to show any social inclinations. Strydom looked him over very carefully before replying.

“Agreed then. But first we both have some work left to do.”

“True, doc. I haven’t had a proper scratch round yet. Must be signs of a break-in somewhere, whatever Van der Poel says.”

“And I’d better call in my lads and their meat tray. With the weather what it is, Mr. Swart here is long overdue in his freezer.”

After a meticulous examination of all points of possible entry, Kramer had finally to admit to Van der Poel that he might be right. Nobody had forced his way into the house; either he had found a door or window open, or he had been in possession of a key.

“So I still say it was the servant boy—he had one,” Van der Poel declared.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Kramer replied, shrugging. “Your blokes haven’t found him yet?”

“No, but they will. We’ve got his girlfriend in the garage—your boy’s talking to her.”

“Zondi? We’re all right then.”

“Actually, sir, I was just going to ask if I—”

“Leave Kaffirs’ work to Kaffirs, Van der Poel. Where did you grow up?”

Van der Poel had the surprising good sense to treat this as a joke, half of which it was. They walked in and out of a few more rooms in a desultory way and stopped once more in the study.

“Lot of books, sir.”

“Maybe some dirty ones, too, if you look hard enough.”

“Never!”

Kramer almost disclosed his discovery of the vodka but then saw no reason to share it with everyone. He was amused to see Van der Poel edge over to the shelves and cock his head sideways in search of a titillating title. If the man had any intelligence, he would look behind the big Bible.

“Yirra, this bloke must have been a professor,” Van der Poel exclaimed, having reached the end of an incomprehensible row. “One hour on Sunday’s enough for me—and that’s not every Sunday, mind. Never turn down a Sunday duty if I get the chance.”

“Hmmm? How’s that?”

Kramer was not listening. He was taking a look through the desk and finding it about as exciting as frisking a store dummy.

There were six drawers in all, five more than most people would have troubled to use for the meager contents. Bills, top left; receipts, top right; car papers, middle left; stationery, bottom right—and not as much as a puff of fluff or a loose pin to disrupt the arid orderliness. So he had to be wrong about the books—the dead man had not possessed enough passion to leave toothmarks on a bloody pencil.

“You’re wrong about the books, sir.”

“Uh huh.”

“Find anything?”

“So-so. Swart lived within his means, kept most of his money in the bank, writing small checks for the day-to-day needs—in other words, I wouldn’t say there’s a cash box missing anywhere here. And I don’t see how he’d have enough to buy anything worth stealing, so we can rule out the idea of theft.”

“It’s a good neighborhood, though, sir—housebreaker couldn’t be expected to know what he had.”

“Thought you said it was the servant?”

“I do—I mean.…”

“You’re crossing your wires, hey, Van der Poel? Take the ideas one at a time. Housebreaking: this place is a likely target because of its situation and because it’s empty first part of most evenings, with Swart at church and the servant off duty. Say somehow a skelm got in here and was looking around when Swart got home. Now if Swart cornered him and then had been stabbed, I could understand it. But Swart was mixing himself a drink in the kitchen; all the housebreaker had to do was go out the front door. You can’t tell me Swart was killed so that the skelm could finish looking; any damn fool could see straight off there was nothing here worth all this trouble.”

A white constable knocked on the door and came in.

“Excuse me, lieutenant, sir, but the sergeant is wanted on the telephone.”

“Carry on, old mate,” Kramer said, dismissing them both. Then he sat down behind the desk, found a place for his feet on the blotter, and went on uncrossing the wires in his own mind.

In the end, the only possible basis for the murder motive was something personal between Swart and his killer. Personal, that was it—a relationship that had gone lethally wrong. This made it murder proper, as opposed to a killing—a useful distinction which Kramer always sought to establish at the outset. Because murder itself had a pattern, and at least that was a start when, in a particular case, none other was immediately apparent. This pattern was basically statistical and concerned relationships. The exact figures were unimportant once you had absorbed their message, which came down to: you stood the least chance of being murdered by a work colleague, a greater chance of being murdered by a friend or close acquaintance, and the best chance of all of being murdered by a member of your household.

Now Father Lawrence had made it clear that Swart was both admired and liked at the church, and it was reasonable to suppose his behavior was equally unprovocative in the drafting office. The possibility certainly existed of his having friends and acquaintances outside these circles, but so far all the evidence pointed to a man far too disciplined for clandestine living. There was also the possibility, of course, that Swart, having committed a grievous wrong in his past, had become a penitent sinner only to finally pay the price when this wrong was secretly avenged. An attractive little theory in its way, but the sort apt to lead detection astray. The more obvious lines of inquiry had first to be explored.

Such as the statistical probability that the solution lay right there in the domestic situation. The priest had presumably told the truth, but history abounded with saints great and little who became fiends in the privacy of their own homes. Which was all well and good—except, with the girlfriend so far away, the only relationship left was with the servant boy.

Kramer had now argued himself right back to where he had not wanted to finish up—on the same side of the table as Van der Poel. Inescapably, boringly, the wog was indeed the most likely candidate. To begin with, he had the wog mentality. Kramer did not ascribe to it a mystique capable of heinous crime totally without provocation, as Van der Poel undoubtedly did, but he conceded that here you had a thinking process—or rather, form of reaction—unlike his own. He had seen a word in English-language newspapers that described it well: overkill. And overkill there was in the shantytowns and alleyways of Trekkersburg—with the country as a whole, its population 22 million, racking up 6,500 murders a year. The only thing that made sense of it was to imagine that a small incident was the last straw on the camel’s back. That inside every wog was this big sense of outrage and all you needed to do was add a touch more and the whole lot went up. What put it there in the first place was more than he had ever troubled to.…

Bloody hell, this was sodding philosophy and he had a killer to catch! Correction, murderer.

The servant, then, may have been provoked beyond endurance by demands made upon him and have just struck out. Wait a moment, that burnt steak could have something to do with it. Swart comes home hot and tired, finds his supper spoiled, bawls for the servant, the servant comes in from his room in the yard, has it dropped on him from a dizzy height, Swart finishes what he has to say and turns his back—and gets it, with the first thing to hand: a steak knife. Then the servant backs out, locks the door, and runs for it. Good plausible stuff, however unoriginal. Originality in crime was something only whites seemed to think important anyway.

One reservation was all that he had: would Hugo Swart, the good Catholic, have staged such a scene with his employee? It was a good question, too, in days when the churches were troublemaking and telling their people to act soft like liberals. He would check with Zondi.

Kramer left the study, nodded to Van der Poel, who was still on the telephone in the hall, and went out to the garage. Only one side of the doorway was open, and there was not much light within, but he took in the details of the servant boy’s girlfriend without much difficulty.

She sat, fat and pathetic, on a fertilizer drum dragged out from a corner, holding her high-heeled shoes in one hand. She was sweating like everyone else that sweltering night, but giving off a very sweet sickliness, a by-product of cold fear. She shook. Trembled and gusted with long sighs. Rubbed tears into dimpled cheeks with the heel of the hand, making a proper mess. She wore a Salvation Army hat with the name ribbon sewn on upside down, and a cast-off frock that may have graced an administrator’s reception—it had its own separate smell of salmon paste. She was terrified.

“Lucy Kwalumi,” said Zondi, making the formal introductions. “Bantu female, works as cook girl at number 3 for Mr. and Mrs. Powell, says she is the wife of the boy here.”

“What’s his name, man?”

“Thomas Shabalala, sir. She says she has not seen him since when their off-time ended at four o’clock. She does not know where he is.”

“You asked her about the off-time?”

“Yes, sir. She says she and Shabalala have their off-time two to four. Today they just sat on the pavement outside, talking.”

“About?”

“She cannot remember. She says it was not important. There were others there, too. Along the gutter by where the car comes in.”

“Did Shabalala talk about his master?”

“Not at all. He was a good master.”

“Ask her if he ever shouted at Shabalala.”

Zondi translated and then, after a sobbed reply that went on and on, interpreted.

“She says the master sometimes shouted—he was a master, wasn’t he?”

“Bloody cheek.”

“This one is not trying to be cheeky, boss.”

“So he liked his master?”

Again Zondi translated and her nod saved time. Then Lucy suddenly volunteered some information on her own.

“It’s all right, Zondi, I understand. Mr. Swart’s churchgoing made things difficult in the evening?”

“That is true, sir. At first he made the boy wait on him nine, ten o’clock at night. He changed this after the priest made a joke about it when he ate at this place one time.”

“So he wasn’t such a good master then, hey?”

Lucy, who had not looked at Kramer while he was speaking in Afrikaans, jerked up her head as he switched to English.

“He was a good master because there was not much work,” she replied in an amusing cultured English accent, giving away her employers as Home County far removed.